Spectators and participants present at baseball games or similar sporting events or other such activities often consume beverages as they watch or participate. At such times, drinks in the form of bottles, cans, and similar containers are often placed on benches, atop fences, or on the ground. Drinks so placed are easily toppled and spilled, and frequently become muddy or soiled. Moreover, with only the drink itself to distinguish it from other drinks similarly placed in such locations, it is easy for a person to mistake his drink for that of someone else.
Chain link fences are common features at forums where sporting events are held. At such sporting events or other activities where a chain link fence is present, spectators will sometimes insert plastic cups, for example, into the meshwork holes of the chain link fence to spell out the name of their favored team or player. More generally, similar artifices have been used as a form of crude signage to communicate advertising, announcements, and various other textual messages and/or simple graphical content. However, where the improvised sign elements do not themselves contain lettering or other symbols but only form recognizable characters through arrangement in patterns of letters, numbers, or the like, even a concise message may require a large number of plastic cups or other such improvised sign elements, and insertion of such a large number of sign elements in the meshwork holes of the chain link fence may prove time-consuming. Furthermore, as such improvised sign elements such as plastic cups are often of such shape and dimensions as to make them only barely suitable for such purpose, it is not surprising to find that these improvised sign elements easily become dislodged from the chain link fence.
In addition, in situations where the so-called fabric of a chain link fence has diamond-shaped meshwork holes, it is typically the case that interweaving of the wire making up the chain link fence causes the wire at two sides of each such diamond-shaped hole to be in a different plane than the wire at the other two sides of the diamond-shaped hole. Proposed methods of mounting an object to a chain link fence that fail to account for this stepped topology of the chain link fence may suffer from drawbacks such as failure to securely grip the chain link fence wire at all four sides of the meshwork hole, unsightly skewing of signage or other object being attached to the chain link fence, as well as nonuniformity in alignment from sign element to sign element (or other such object being mounted to the chain link fence) due to chance variation in mounting when the direction of such skewing can vary depending on mounting orientation.
Therefore, there is a heretofore unaddressed need in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies, such as to provide a manner for securely holding items to fences.